mckellar75238 writes: Can anyone suggest a good way to get into writing X Windows code for Linux? I'm no longer working for a living, but I'm not ready to quit coding yet; my problem is that, although I flatter myself that I'm a good coder, I don't know the tools I need to pop up a window and make it do what I want. I run Fedora Linux 99% of the time, and this is for my own pleasure only, so I need Linux tools that are either free or only a small cost.

To give you an idea of what I' want to do, I used to do graphical UI work for a small VAR company selling PC systems in the pre-Windows world;I really loved that, until they were bought out by a competitor and I had to switch fields (to telecomm, not that it matters). Now that I'm no longer doing telecomm, I'd like to go back to graphics, but everything I knew then is decades out of date.

What I'm really looking for is the Linux equivalent of the Microsoft Visual C IDE. I liked the way I could use it to create a window object, add the bells and whistles I wanted, and then pull up the code in the editor and start adding the "under the hood" code to do what I really wanted. I've tried a couple of Linux IDEs, but the ones I've used so far either are buggy, have little or no documentation, or otherwise leave me floundering helplessly. What I really need is a mentor of some kind, but not having any human ones around, I have to rely on software. Can anyone help me get started?

You'll want to choose what API you want to use for windowing and such. The two main popular ones are QT (KDE) and GTK (Gnome). You might want to try both even. There's lots of IDEs to chose from, like code::blocks, KDevelop, Anjuta, Glade. Heck, you can use Eclipse too if that's what you like. There's also a visual studio plugin for QT development, and probably for others as well. Google is your friend. Also, take your time and find something you like. Give each prospect a good try and in the long run you'l